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Species Spotlight: The Smalltooth Sawfish
Who needs a Swiss army knife when you have a clam rake, fillet knife and sword protruding from your snout? Not the smalltooth sawfish.
Once commonly found in ocean waters from the Gulf of Mexico to North Carolina, smalltooths now mostly only scull the shallows off southwest Florida.
Although they look fearsome, sawfish are actually rather sluggish, spending much of their day nestled on the sea floor. At night they use their long, flat, tooth-studded tool--called a rostrum--to stir buried prey such as crabs and shrimp from the sediment. But more often they launch themselves into schools of jacks, mullet and ladyfish, rapidly swinging from side to side, stunning or lacerating their prey, which fall to the bottom for leisurely grazing.
Often confused with sharks, sawfish--a type of ray--have gills located underneath their body while sharks have gills on their sides. The smalltooth is one of seven species of sawfish worldwide. It can grow to 20 feet, weigh more than 2,000 pounds and live more than 30 years.
Following decades of trophy fishing, entanglement in fishing nets, and coastal development that destroys its nursery habitats, the population may have declined by as much as 95 percent. But the smalltooth’s inclusion on the endangered species list in 2003--the first for a marine fish in U.S. waters--provides a ray of hope that this strange-looking creature will keep tooling around.
